by Spurrier, Jo
In those days there had been as many factions of mages as there were clans. The war had begun when some of those factions decided there was no need for them to accept the clans and the priests as equals and that mages, by grace of their power, were the rightful rulers of the land. While the factions squabbled over just which of the mages should rule, many people who had taken no part in the fighting were caught up in the skirmishes and killed. One of them was a young noblewoman by the name of Jenova, born of the Lion Clan and the daughter of Leandra the First, ancestor to Cam and his aunt, the second queen to bear that name.
At first Leandra had been interested only in finding and punishing the mages responsible, or so the histories said. But when all of the three factions involved turned her messengers away and refused to help her find the truth, her plans changed. Leandra entered an alliance with her neighbouring clans, and with one of the factions of mages, and led an attack against the other two, in which they were wiped out to the newest trainee. In the victory celebration that followed Leandra and her allied clans turned on the mages of their own alliance and slaughtered them as well.
It could have ended there, but Leandra was not content with avenging her daughter’s death. After seeing what mages could do when they wielded their power in anger she was determined to destroy them all, even if it meant overlooking centuries of raids and depredations and allying herself with Mesentreia. After all, the Southern Isles had killed or expelled all their mages half a millennia before and an alliance would end the raids in a manner the mages had never managed to achieve.
It took years of bloody and brutal warfare but Leandra and her armies killed the last of the mages, led by the man now known as the Demon Vasant, at the foot of the northern mountains, where molten rock flowed from the ground like blood from a wound.
As a boy Isidro had been unable to comprehend how Leandra and her armies had been able to wipe out a class of people as powerful as mages were rumoured to be. Once he and Cam had been forced to survive on their own he had grown to understand. At least the two of them were able to ask for help either from the common folk for a warm place to spend the night or from the ruling clans, who in the early days had provided them with horses and weapons in honour of Drosavec and Leandra’s memories. A mage’s power might provide him or her with shelter and warmth but it wouldn’t keep them fed and clothed through six months of darkness and snow. When the common folk turned against them, swayed by the stories Leandra and her allies spread of the atrocities carried out by mages, their power didn’t protect them from poisoned food, arrows in the back or a knife across the throat as they slept, or from traps and snares. Ricalan was a difficult place for outright warfare and in winter guerrilla attacks and swift surprise assault were the only course. A mage who was cold, hungry and weary was as vulnerable as any other warrior under poor conditions — perhaps more so, as they were accustomed to their power providing them with every comfort they desired. Leandra’s army simply wore them to exhaustion and killed them once their powers were spent.
Leandra wasn’t content with wiping out the living mages of Ricalan — she set about making sure that in future generations, mages would never rise again. She destroyed their books and halls of study; she stripped the history books of any mention of mages and of any version of events but hers. At her order, the priests twisted the rituals used to identify children with a talent for mage-craft and used them instead to select those who were forced to wear the amulets that would suppress their power and mark them to be watched. Some of them were inducted into the priesthood itself — they needed some talent to perform the rituals and create the amulets in the first place, but all other use of power was forbidden on pain of death.
Nothing, however, could stop new babes from being born with the talent. Perhaps most of them were like Isidro, carrying only a feeble spark of power, but there had to be some whose power burned too bright and fierce to be extinguished by a priest’s mumbled and half-understood rituals. Isidro had always dreamed of meeting one — but he’d never imagined it would happen like this.
Sierra slung his good arm across her shoulder, taking some of his weight as she guided him to the shelter of a copse of trees. It was only once he was leaning against the naked trunk of a birch that he was able to look at her properly.
Miniature bolts of lightning coursed over her with an unearthly blue glow, writhing over her skin and through her hair. Raw power hissed and crackled around her hands and sent long, questing tendrils to the ground where they writhed around her feet. When one flickered too close to her face she swatted at it with a mittened hand as though to shoo it away.
‘You’re the real thing, aren’t you?’ Isidro said hoarsely, and coughed again. ‘A Child of the Black Sun.’
She gave him a wry smile. ‘Something like that.’
A minor mage-talent such as the one he’d inherited from his mother was one thing — useless without training and easily contained by the warding-stones — but Sierra was in a different class entirely. A Child of the Black Sun was to him what a tiger was to a house cat. If he was tainted by the touch of power he carried, then she was nothing less than a demon in the flesh. When there had been mages in Ricalan, the Children of the Black Sun were their elite. Over time, his meagre talent would atrophy like an unused limb for want of training; folk like her would be consumed by the power that lived beneath their skin.
In Mesentreia, a child with the talent would be killed. Even if her family tried to protect her there was no defence against a mob prepared to beat a child to death in the street. The priests in Ricalan denied they would allow any such thing but no one ever said exactly what would happen if the Children’s Festival discovered a child who had been touched by the Black Sun. They were every bit as dangerous as a rabid bear — anyone who doubted it had only to look at Lord Kell and his apprentice.
‘I knew you’d recognise me eventually,’ she said. ‘You saw me clearly when Rasten brought you into the tent, but I wasn’t sure how much you remembered.’
‘It wasn’t you I recognised — not at first, anyway.’ He pulled the folded paper out of his sash and handed it to her. She unfolded it carefully, her mittened hands clumsy as the wind tugged and tore at the sheet. He watched her eyes rove over the printed text and realised she could read Mesentreian. ‘I like this tale Kell concocted. Foul enough that no one would shelter me, but not so bad they’d want to kill me on the spot.’ She gave a small sigh of resignation. ‘If the clans knew what I am they’d kill me rather than let Kell take me back …’ She handed the paper back and met his gaze. ‘I’m sorry, Isidro,’ she said. ‘I would have stopped them if I could —’
‘Sorry for what?’ he said. ‘From what I saw you were as much a prisoner as I was.’
For a moment neither of them spoke and the only sound was the moaning of the wind in the pines.
‘Who else knows?’ Sierra said.
‘No one, yet. I only picked the likeness because I’d seen you before. Cam will work it out in a few days — the others might, too, if they got a good look at that portrait.’
She took a step back, stricken, and her breath hitched in her chest. ‘I’ll leave,’ she said. ‘First thing in the morning. I’ve endangered you all enough already.’
‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘It’ll be weeks before you can see clearly in daylight. If you leave now you’ll be dead inside of two days — if the soldiers or Charzic’s men don’t find you first.’
‘I can’t stay,’ she said. ‘I can’t hide what I am for long — I’ll only give myself away. It’s better if they never know.’
Isidro remembered the heavy green stones in her pack. ‘The warding-stones — you could put them on again.’
She shuddered violently. ‘I hate those things! They’re not strong enough by themselves anyway. That’s why Kell made the punishment bands.’
Isidro blinked. ‘The burns …’ He remembered the blisters and her charred skin.
She looked away, fierce blue-grey eyes searching t
he darkness around them. ‘They were supposed to teach me to control myself.’
All at once the thought of Rasten alone with her hit him like a punch to the gut. After that first day, once they knew Cam was beyond their reach, Kell and Rasten had shown him every way a man could be tormented, degraded and humiliated while still leaving him more or less in one piece. Isidro knew it was stupid, a worthless remnant of a pride he no longer had the right to claim, but the thought of someone else being forced to submit as he had filled him with rage.
Sierra frowned at him and he wondered if she could read the pain in his face. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Rasten,’ he said. ‘And you —’
‘Ah,’ she said, and shook her head. ‘No, thank the Gods for small mercies, he never touched me. Kell made sure of that. Rasten was like me once, but Kell ruined him by taking him too hard, too young. He wanted to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to me. If he finds me again, though, that will be the least of his concerns.’ She bit her lip. ‘When he finds me. Will you tell Cam?’
‘I have to,’ Isidro said. ‘He needs to know the danger we’re in.’
She turned away with a snarl and kicked at a clump of snow. ‘That wretched Brekan! He’s got no idea what he’s done.’ The lightning bolts coursing around her had settled but now they sprang up again; a bolt as thick as his finger arced between her hand and the ground and coursed up her arm to her shoulder, crackling like dry leaves in a blaze.
‘Do you have anywhere to go?’ Isidro said. ‘Anyone who will take you in?’
She shook her head. ‘No. No one.’
‘How badly will Kell want to find you? Once the Akharians meet the king’s army surely he and Rasten both will be needed there — they won’t have time to search the wilderness for you.’
‘It’s not as simple as that.’
‘No? Why not?’
She bit her lip, and Isidro guessed she was debating just how much she should tell him. ‘I’m a Sympath. Do you know what that means?’
‘No. Is it an Akharian word?’
She frowned. ‘I don’t know. Kell came from there, so I suppose it might be. A Sympath is a mage who generates power from pain. Kell can raise power on his own with his rituals but it’s nothing compared to what he can take if I’m there, too. He’ll stop at nothing to get me back.’
He could still picture her, chained and kneeling on the floor. How many souls had suffered and died in front of her while she was powerless to prevent it?
‘You must have kin somewhere,’ he said.
She looked away. ‘They’re probably dead. When Kell found me, he had us trapped in a ruined temple. He said he’d spare them if I gave myself up. I had no choice.’
‘I heard something about that,’ Isidro said. ‘There were rumours the king’s torturer had a new apprentice.’
‘A new slave, more like,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘What else did you hear? Was there any word of survivors?’
Isidro shook his head. ‘No. I’m sorry.’
‘He killed Rasten’s family. They tried to hide him and Kell slaughtered the lot of them. Rasten was twelve.’
She was looking away — she couldn’t have seen the expression that crossed his face at the sound of the apprentice’s name. Isidro screwed his eyes shut, fighting against the memories that welled up. Sierra had been there — she’d felt every moment of it. Isidro shoved the thought to the back of his mind. Better to forget.
‘You should go back inside,’ Sierra said. ‘Come on, I’ll help you.’
The energy spilling from her had died down, but whether she had brought it under control again or simply burned off the excess, Isidro wasn’t sure. He didn’t protest when she offered him her arm and they started back towards the tents.
‘You know,’ Sierra said. ‘You’re the only person who’s seen me shed power like that who hasn’t run like a pack of wolves was after him.’
‘Really?’ he said.
‘Except for Kell and Rasten. Even my family were frightened of it. My fathers were furious every time I let it slip.’
‘Well, I’ve never met anyone who carried the taint who was willing to talk openly about it,’ Isidro said. He wanted to say more but between the cough and the cold he was still breathless and light-headed. His wits were sluggish enough that something she’d said earlier only struck him then.
‘Wait a moment — Kell is Akharian?’
‘Of course. He left their mage-school when he was young and found a master in Mesentreia to train him to the Blood Path. I think it happens a lot — many of the Blood-Mages in Mesentreia come from Akhara. Mesentreian children who show the talent tend not to survive, but sometimes the parents are tricked into handing the children over to a Blood-Mage, thinking the mage will keep them safe. The mages either use them up or turn them into apprentices if they’re strong enough to survive. If their families knew what they were letting the children in for they’d smother them with pillows. It would be kinder.’
A tremor of unease ran through Isidro. ‘How much was Kell relying on you to face the Akharian mages?’
She gave a small, tight smile, but it quickly faded. ‘He’s going to have to change his plans … unless he finds those cursed stones and tracks me here.’
The more he heard, the less he liked the situation. If Sierra was so important to Kell’s strategy, then he and the king would stop at nothing to get her back, even if it meant losing ground in the short term. The northern lands were all held by Ricalanis and the king would lose no sleep for holdings burned and villages enslaved north of the Mesentreian settlements. They had to get word of this to the Wolf Clan — and yet it was too dangerous now for them to dare show their faces in a village.
‘I’ll leave here as soon as I can,’ Sierra said. ‘I’ve put you in enough danger as it is.’
‘You should talk with Cam,’ Isidro said. ‘We’ve been living on the run for a long time now. We might be able to come up with a plan for you.’
They were approaching the tent when the flap swung open and Cam ducked through, settling his coat around his shoulders. As soon as he straightened and saw them, he stopped. ‘There you are, Issey! You were gone so long I was starting to worry.’ He turned to Sierra with a frown. ‘He’s not strong enough to stand around out here in the cold.’
Isidro could feel Sierra bristle but he spoke before she could reply. ‘The cough got me again, that’s all. Sierra waited with me until it passed.’
‘Sierra?’ Cam said, raising one eyebrow. ‘I thought you said your name was Kasimi.’
Isidro pulled the crumpled paper out of his belt and handed it back to Cam. ‘It’s her. I mean, the story’s a load of horseshit, but it’s her they’re searching for.’
Cam tucked the paper away without looking at it. ‘Now why is that? I don’t see how one woman could be worth a reward of ten thousand crowns; so just who are you, Sierra?’
‘Cam —’
‘She can tell me herself. Better yet, we can go inside and she can tell all of us.’
Isidro shook his head. ‘Better to keep this quiet. Trust me, you don’t want —’ An odd sound reached his ears and Isidro broke off mid-sentence. It was faint, but he could have sworn he heard the whinny of a horse carried on the wind. Sierra caught her breath in a gasp and Cam raised a hand for silence.
‘Did you hear that?’ he said in a breathless whisper. Isidro pointed to their own horses huddled at their tether with their rumps turned into the wind. The lead mare had raised her head to scent the wind and pricked her stubby ears to listen.
Sierra had turned pale. ‘Rasten —’
‘No one could have recognised the stones so quickly,’ Isidro said. ‘Anyone who has found us now would have to have followed the others from the village. Cam, is there any chance you could have been recognised?’
Cam grimaced. ‘The local commander was asking a lot of questions. I didn’t think he’d come to any conclusions, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to worry anyone.�
��
‘Couldn’t it just be a trapper?’ Sierra asked.
‘Trappers don’t bother with horses,’ Cam said. He ducked back into the tent and returned with his sword belt, which he buckled over his coat, and then reached for one of the spears standing upright in the snow outside the tent. ‘Both of you go inside — tell Garzen what we heard. I’ll go and check it out.’
‘Take Sierra with you,’ Isidro said. ‘Cam, she’s Kell’s second apprentice — she fought her way out of the Mesentreian camp. If there’s trouble the two of you are the best ones to face it.’
Cam blinked and then, as the information sunk in, he recoiled. ‘Kell’s apprentice? How —’ He broke off and shook himself like a dog. ‘No time for that now.’ He turned to Sierra. ‘Are you with us?’
He didn’t trust her. She could tell from the way he kept glancing back. Isidro’s calm acceptance of what she was had come as a shock but this wariness and suspicion was something familiar and Sierra felt herself bristling in response. By the Black Sun, if the Mesentreians had found their camp, they were all in danger and yet Cammarian was watching her like an enemy. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her — was it a frightened herder-girl in borrowed clothes or a demon in the flesh, trailing destruction and despair in her path?
With the spear held low, Cam moved in near silence over the snow, any small sounds he made covered by the moaning wind. To her surprise Sierra found she slipped easily into the stalk she’d learned as a child during the long hours she’d spent watching over the goat herd, with nothing to break the boredom but practise with her leather sling and a handful of stones. She knew it was irrational, but she would have given anything to have her old sling again. The only weapon she had now was her power and if she was forced to use that it would be bloody. Black Sun please let it be a false alarm. I don’t want to kill again.